The Real 5/31

I didn't want to title all these posts with the date but with the time difference... maybe it's just easier if I try to throw it in there somewhere. Anyway, here's my day from 5/31 (Thursday).

Today was Rob and I's first full day off in Israel and we spent it in Tel Aviv. You've been hearing quite a bit about our trips to the beach where we're staying (in Herzliya Petuach, a Tel Aviv suburb) so I'm sure it will be no surprise that the beach in Tel Aviv is equally great.

The area we were in all day definitely had much more of a big city feel than in our suburb. The streets were bustling and shops lined the streets. Good news for those who have been pestering me in the comments :) -- I bought a digital camera! I actually think that I got a pretty good deal - I got a nice digital camera with a huge memory card for 1350 sheckles! How the heck much is that??? It's about 4:1 so it was $350 for the camera and case. That's not cheap, but I really needed a camera and ours is actually broken at home - so it's not like this is only for this one trip or something like that.


As always, all of our photos are here. The rest of the photos for this day in Tel Aviv (27 total) are here.

Anyway, the day was really great - very hot but a steady wind helped us out quite a bit. We did A LOT of walking around the beaches, shops, and other sights of Tel Aviv's harbor.



To end the night we met up with two of our co-workers: Adam and Shmueli for dinner before heading home. We also got to see where Shmueli lives, which was cool - his apartment is not unlike what you'd expect if you were to visit someone the same age in Chicago or another big American city. We also learned that (like Chicago) much of the neighborhood is made up of a very young population and that people typically move as they move into the next phases of life.


Speaking of "next phases of life" - the Israeli's our age seem quite shocked that both Rob and I are married already. Israeli's go from High School into a mandatory 3 year term in the military. After that they typically travel the world for a year before going on to work or more school or whatever else American kids would have been doing 3-5 years earlier... so, I guess it makes sense that most people here get married a bit later.

The bad part of the night was that I started feeling really bad just before dinner. Our dinner was great - so that definitely wasn't the problem, but I just seem to have a knot in my stomach that I can't shake. Maybe it's not a terrible thing though as tomorrow morning (715AM) we'll be heading out for a weekend tour of Israel that will take us through so many sites that I really want to see that I won't list them here... I'm sure you'll be hearing about them all soon enough!